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Getting Started
Back Firstly, welcome to MissionChief. A free-to-play web based emergency dispatching game. The objective? Deal with emergency calls of various nature as they are presented to you, using the resources you have available. At first glance MissionChief can appear quite complex; it does indeed have many features available for you to enjoy the game. But, despite appearances, the game is very easy to learn and this guide will talk you through the various options in game to get you on your feet. It is broken down into a few sections. Open the spoiler tab below each heading to read. 1. Concept I felt its best I break down what’s actually involved in MissionChief as there are a few key parts. Now the obvious key part is the missions; Emergency calls (be it Fire, EMS or Police) will generate and you need to send suitable resources to these. But where do these come from? They come from stations and you choose where the various Fire, EMS and Police stations are going to be located. You can do this anywhere in the world but be mindful that you need to complete an infrastructure, so you may need to send units from one town/city to another when you start expanding for larger incidents as your one fire station may not have the resources to deal with it. Therefore I recommend you build one central base and then expand outwards when you build (we can talk about this more another time, however). The only rule is that the station is accessible by road. That means you can make up the locations and you don’t have to base them off real world station locations, unless of course you want to! Lastly, the type of units and where they go is also down to you. From a fire engine, to HAZMAT, to aerial platform trucks; you pick which stations they are based in. What do you get from all of this? Credits. This is what you earn from jobs but is needed to build and expand your infrastructure. You start with some credits but these will go down. It can sometimes feel that there is a slow start but it doesn’t take too long before the pace picks up. The alternative to Credits is Coins. Primarily coins are purchased with real money and allow you to use them as an alternative to credits. There are a few features which only accept coins initially (available with credits when you rank up) but these are for multi-purpose units and are not required for playing MissionChief (an alternative unit is available). In summary you can play MissionChief purely on credits and coins are only there to speed things up should you desire. You will never be stuck at any particular point where you are required to pay with coins to continue. 2. Interface Before we start doing anything its best we go through the main interface of the game. While it may be tempting to jump right in to building your first base, understanding where to find the various options and features are will help you in the long run. This is main game window and what you see here does not really change in terms of it's layout. Additional windows overlay over the main game screen but you can close these by pressing the small ‘X’ at the top right hand corner of each window. Within the image above I have labelled the key areas of the main game window 1. Map Search 2. Toolbar 3. Map 4. Incident List 5. Station/Units List 6. Alliance Chat 7. Radio Messages Map Search When you first sign in to your account you will see a large green arrow pointing to this box. Typing a location in here (ie a town/city) will take you to it. As said earlier you choose where your first base is going to be. If you want have a play around feel free Toolbar This is where you access most of your core options. We’ll go through them in detail another time but from initial glance you can see this is where your current balance of credits and coins is. This updates as and when credits/coins are gained/spent. Map This map displays your units and incidents. You won’t see icons yet as you don’t have any units/incidents/stations. We’ll soon change that later. You can drag this map with the Left Mouse Button, zoom with the scroll wheel (or use the buttoms at the top left). There is no right-click interaction on this map. Incident List Also looking quite empty currently, this is where all of your incidents are displayed. The green buttons at the top are filters although without any incidents it’s difficult to explain how they are work currently. Incidents appear row by row when they are displayed. Station/Units List This is a ‘tree’ or list of all your buildings and units. Again another empty box for now but soon we will be adding our first fire station which will appear here. Alliance Chat When you join an Alliance (Multiplayer group that you can work with) you can chat with other players in this box. We’re not in an alliance for now so it will remain empty until we join Radio Messages This is a live time window which, row by row, updates with the latest status update for a unit. For example, when they clear from a job they will become available and it will show the relevant status number for that. Refreshing the page will clear this. It isn’t entirely important to monitor this, however useful should you want to wait for a particular unit to come away or arrive at a job. Once you’ve had a play around with the interface we’ll get ready to building our first fire station. 3. Building Missions rely on the availability of a certain number of bases existing before they will appear. No fire station, no fire calls. The primary ‘service’ within MissionChief is the Fire Department so the tutorial will focus on this; however you will find that the principle of the game works the same for Ambulance and Police for the most part. As you expand and have multiple fire stations, EMS bases and police stations you will see more complex calls appear in your incident list. A link at the bottom right hand corner of your main game window titled ‘Possible Missions’ explains the incidents and what is required should you want some further reading. Once you have decided on a rough location on the map you want to build a fire station, you can click the ‘Build a new building’; This will be highlighted by a large green arrow if you’ve recently created your account. It will then reveal the following; You will see a blue marker has appeared on the map. Move this by left clicking and holding the left mouse button on it, dragging it to your desired location. Zoom in as far as you can on the map to ensure it is placed exactly where you want it. As I’ve said before you need it to be near a road so the fire trucks have something to drive on to get to their emergency calls. Once placed, select from the drop down titled Building Type and choose ‘Fire Station’. After, type a name you want to give your first fire station. You can change the name later if you wish. Select a fire engine type from the drop down. Currently they serve the same role/purpose so make no difference which you pick. They just have a different appearance (the type 1 being bigger) on the default unit icons. Once decided and happy with everything click ‘Build with 100,000 credits’. The alternative is using 30 coins as mentioned before. Your game window will now update and a red and white marker will have appeared on your map. Hopefully this is where you chose your fire station to be (if not you can click on it and delete/refund it to then place it again - you have 24 hours to do this). The tree of your emergency services infrastructure has also begun in your Stations/Unit List. You can see your fire station listed, then below that the fire engine within it. You are ready to deploy to your first call which usually appears straight away. With a call waiting that will take us to the next section, deployment! 4. Deployment So as you can see our first call has come in (or in my screenshot I’ve already got two!). Deployment is relatively straight forward. Click ‘Dispatch’ next to the incident you want to deploy and this will bring up a window; To break down this window, quite simply the red striped bar at the top left is the status bar. Above that is the mission icon. When the mission icon goes from red to green the mission has all the resources it requires and once the bar is empty the mission is completed. Any additional resources that are not at scene but required to complete the mission will appear in a red box (not visible in this picture). The deployment screen won't tell you what units you require until the first one gets there. The column on the right lists your deployable units with the unit at the top of the list being the closest unit. However, This may not always be the most appropriate unit to send but we will cover working that out at a later date. For now I can assure you that your first missions only requires one fire engine. You most definitely have one and it should display in the list on the right. Tick the box to the left of the unit. The green box with a 2 in it tells you the unit is ‘Status 2’ which means available. The distance is how long away it is in minutes and then it tells you what fire station it is coming from. With the unit ticked, hit the green button that says ‘Dispatch’ (either at the top right or bottom left). Your window should now look something like this; The unit has moved to the left side of the window now. On this side you will see the units responding/en-route and those on scene. Quite simply when the ETA of a responding unit reaches 0 seconds they have arrived on scene. Press the ‘X’ on the top right hand corner and you can see your fire truck driving to the incident (to note, once a unit is at a station or incident it no longer appears on your map anymore. Only units driving somewhere appear on the map). Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to get there. Once all the required units are on scene and no further are required the icon will go green and the progress bar will start going down. You can see the top incident is working its way to be completing completed. That is it. You have resourced your first ever call and completed it too. By this point I imagine you have some more calls outstanding as they continue to come in. You can continue to work through these to build your credits up. No doubt you’ll be keeping your fire truck busy, so keep working hard so you can earn more credits to expand your stations and fleet! There are alternative ways of deploying units to a job, which can be done by opening the window for a specific unit (by clicking on it on the map or from the units list). In a similar way it will display the closest jobs to that particular unit. You can deploy by which ever way is easiest for you. 5. Finally There are a few important things I felt need mentioning as they are likely to be useful to you as you start. Mission Speed You will find the missions appear at quite a rapid rate (at least quite rapid for someone who’s still quite new) and you may be more comfortable of the calls slowed down a bit. Thankfully MissionChief allows you to choose how fast (or slow) the calls come in in aid of your style. To change the Mission Speed, from the toolbar locate Profile, then Mission Speed from the drop down. You can then select how often the calls generate. You can change this whenever so if you demand is getting too much and you can’t keep up, drop the speed a notch or two until you catch up. There is a cap on the number if missions you get and this increases based on the number of fire stations you have. Alliances I 100% recommend joining an alliance if you are going to be playing MissionChief a fair amount. I won’t go into full details of what you get but the basics is that you can request other neighbouring players for assistance with your jobs, just in case you don’t have enough fire trucks etc. MissionChief allows you to delete a building and give you a full refund if done so within 24 hours of it building. After this you lose your money. Most Alliances build their emergency service bases based on real world locations and players split themselves up over districts, towns/cities etc. I would recommend looking early to see if there is an Alliance you may want to look at joining early on before you build your infrastructure too much as the alliance that might interests you most might not be building anywhere near you thus unable to help. I will explain joining an alliance in another tutorial along with it’s all it’s benefits but to get you started you can find this under the Alliance tab and click on Alliance List. That concludes my getting started tutorial. I understand it is quite detailed but hopefully those who learn games quite quickly can skim through to get what information they need to know. I will be covering expanding your stations and the additional vehicles you might get within the next tutorial soon.